Posted by Charles on October 5th, 2010

As an online business owner, building quality inbound links to your website can be quite an overwhelming process, especially with many more e-commerce business owners hoping to capitalize on the benefits of search engine optimization each day.

This means that instead of just using basic and well-known tactics for building backlinks, you have to move off of the beaten path and get creative with these little known tools:

BuzzStream: This is a tool that helps automate many of the more menial tasks associated with link building within one complete CRM system. You will be able to track your e-mail and Twitter accounts, find out contact information, manage your prospective links, monitor your existing backlinks, and track conversion rates. In short, this tool will help manage the links you already have and help you organize opportunities for new link building relationships. There is a free trial available, and the monthly rates range from $29-$249.

Majestic-SEO: This is an innovative tool to help you track your link information for your own website or even your competitors’ domains. As the owner of a domain, you will receive a detailed report that has information about anchor text and unique links, and you can use credits within the service to find out similar information about your competition online. This tool also provides daily updates to keep track of new inbound links!

Yahoo! Site Explorer: This is a free and popular tool that helps you to analyze inbound links for your domain, as well as your competitors’ websites. You can find inbound links for each page, exclude inbound links from a specific domain, determine which pages in a domain have been indexed, and export all data into a TSV file for your records.

SEOmoz Linkscape: This is a tracking tool to regulate inbound links, and a free and advanced paid subscription is available. The search tool will allow you to find out how many inbound links you have going to a certain page, including which unique domains link to that page. Further data supplied will include inbound link quality, page rank, and the authority of a domain. You can also find out what keywords your competitors are targeting and what authority links they may have going back to their site to further shape your SEO strategy.

Exalead: This is a sorting tool that helps you to find backlinks to your website coming from forums, blogs, and non-commercial and commercial websites. You can also narrow down your search by geographic region, language, keywords, or even related keywords.

Raven SEO Tools: This is a complete resource of SEO tools for link management to help you organize and control backlinks going to your website. You will receive an alert if any changes have been made to an active backlink, such as being switched to no follow or having the anchor text or page rank changed. You will also receive an alert if the link is removed completely. All results can be easily exported into CSV format for your records, and the cost of the program begins at $79 each month.

SoloSEO Link Building: This is another resource to manage your SEO campaign through assessing your backlinks, where you can easily track all inbound links going to your domain. The Links Manager tool will help you determine the quality and strength of specific backlinks, and you will also be notified if a link has been removed. You will receive further details, like PageRank, Alexa rank, backlink count, and DMOZ listing for backlinks going to your website. A free trial is available, and the service costs $29 per month for five domains with $4 for each additional domain afterward.

BlogPulse: This helpful tool will track blog backlinks for any domain you choose, and it also works for non-blog domains. You can create an advanced search for the blogosphere based on your specific keywords or anchor text, and you can also use the trend search and conversation tracker as additional tools.

The point is that if you want to succeed in your SEO campaign for marketing your website online, you do need to be savvy in the tools that you use. As a general tip, many of the above menial tasks of managing and assessing your backlinks can be outsourced to a reputable outsourced staff so that you can spend your time where it counts –focusing on successfully marketing your business online!

This is a guest post by Nitin Aggarwal who is a full time blogger and likes to share his views on internet marketing. He is the founder of Offshore Ally, a virtual assistant company. You can connect with him via his site or twitter.